Last weekend, Susan and I went out for breakfast.
I don’t mean we picked up breakfast from a drive-thru and ate together in our car at a local park. I mean, we went inside an honest-to-goodness restaurant, sat down at a table, ate breakfast, and lived to tell the tale.
With our regular haunt still closed, we visited one of our backups (Sunnyside Diner) and decided to give it a try. Oklahoma is deep in Phase 2 of its reopening plan, with Phase 3 (reopening of schools and most everything else) set to occur this weekend on June 1. Restaurants have been open for a couple of weeks now, but it wasn’t until last weekend that we built up enough courage to actually visit one.
Like most restaurants that have reopened, Sunnyside Diner has made many changes to ensure the safety of its customers. This was evident the moment we exited our car and noticed the hostess’s podium had been moved outside onto the sidewalk next to the parking lot. Inside the chairs at the bar were spaced further apart, the two rows of tables on the floor had been reduced to one, and a blue arrow had been taped to the floor, establishing a one-way flow through the dining area.
Our waiter (and all employees) were wearing masks, and the table we were seated at was completely bare — the condiments did not arrive until after we did, and I joked that we may have been looking at the least-sticky condiment carrier in the history of breakfast restaurants. The menus were freshly printed on paper and disposable. The menu had been streamlined (my delicious Eggs in Purgatory were nowhere to be found!) but plenty of delicious options remained.
Most of the meal was spent commenting on how weird the whole experience was. With few customers making idle chatter, the restaurant was eerily quiet. Every fork scraping against a plate sounded like someone loudly tapping against a glass window with their keys. When the only other customer in the restaurant sent his eggs back, we could hear every detail of the exchange. He had ordered scrambled, not fried. Moments later, we heard the conversation between the waitress and the cook. I don’t know if I would call this the new normal, but it certainly wasn’t the old normal we were used to.
By the end of our meal, a few more tables had filled up. When a dad lost control of his two-year-old who began running laps around the restaurant, you could see people physically shifting their bodies to avoid contact with the toddler. Any illusion that things had returned to normal was shattered.
It’s strange how normal eating inside a restaurant once felt compared to how on edge we were throughout most of the meal. We haven’t eaten inside any other restaurants this week — not because of anything that happened, but because we’re taking it slow.
